Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum. He co-chairs the American Bar Association Committee on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and serves on the program committee of National Robotics Week.

We invite submissions for We Robot 2016 to be held in Coral Gables, Florida on April 1-2, 2016 at the University of Miami School of Law. We Robot–the premier US conference on law and policy relating to Robotics that began at the University of Miami School of Law in 2012, and has since been held at Stanford and University of Washington–returns to Miami Law April 1st-2nd in 2016. Attendees include lawyers, engineers, philosophers, robot builders, ethicists, and regulators who are on the front lines of robot theory, design, or development. The main conference will be preceded by a day of special workshops (see below). The conference web site is http://robots.law.miami.edu/2016.

The program commitee invites submissions for the fourth annual robotics law and policy conference—We Robot 2015—to be held in Seattle, Washington on April 10-11, 2015 at the University of Washington School of Law. We Robot has been hosted twice at the University of Miami School of Law and once at Stanford Law School.

In a recent op-ed, author Evgeny Morozov claims that we tend to think of privacy in terms of control over personal information rather than power or influence. “The privacy debate, incapacitated by misplaced pragmatism, defines privacy as individual control over information flows,” writes Morozov. Instead we should be thinking of how and why powerful institutions use data to nudge us toward their own economic and political ends.

Cyberlaw is the study of the intersection between law and the Internet. It should come as no surprise, then, that the defining questions of cyberlaw grew out of the Internet's unique characteristics. For instance: an insensitivity to distance led some courts to rethink the nature of jurisdiction. A tendency, perhaps hardwired, among individuals and institutions to think of "cyberspace" as an actual place generated a box of puzzles around the nature of property, privacy, and speech.

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"“It’s certainly the case that birthday and name alone are unlikely by themselves to lead to identity theft, or they shouldn’t,” said Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor specializing in digital issues.

Calo said government has legitimate concerns about releasing records that could cause problems, such as information about children. Privacy is important and deserves protection, he said."

"“Right now these systems are either not doing what they’re supposed to be doing or they’re doing things in ways that allow the companies that are selling them to hide behind trade secrets, so what I would say … is that California should not deploy these systems in any aspect of government until it really feels like it understands what the system does, and that the system is amenable to the kinds of guarantees and processes and procedures that we have made formally to our citizens,” Calo said."

"Microsoft is working on some of these areas through groups such as the Partnership on AI, which includes rivals like Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. Still, the call for more regulation in an emerging area like AI is unusual for technology companies, said Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who has read the book.

"The law has been unable to keep up with rapid advancements in auto technology, according to Ryan Calo, an associate professor of law at the University of Washington who teaches courses on robotics law and policy.

“Ultimately, there’s no car privacy statute that car companies have to abide by,” he said. “Not only are automakers collecting a lot of data, they don’t have a particular regime that is regulating how they do it.”"

"“Obstruction of justice definitions vary widely by country,” says Ryan Calo, a cyberlaw professor at the University of Washington. “What’s clear is that Uber maintained a general pattern of legal arbitrage.”"

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U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, will convene a hearing on Wednesday, November 16, 2016, at 3:00 p.m. entitled “Exploring Augmented Reality.” The hearing will examine the emergence, benefits, and implications of augmented reality technologies. Unlike virtual reality that creates a wholly simulated reality, augmented reality attempts to superimpose images and visual data on the physical world in an intuitive way.

The University of Washington School of Law is delighted to announce a public workshop on the law and policy of artificial intelligence, co-hosted by the White House and UW’s Tech Policy Lab. The event places leading artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a wise and effective policy framework for this increasingly important technology. The event is free and open to the public but requires registration. -

CIS Affiliate Scholar Ryan Calo interviews Neal Stephenson, author of Readme. Topics include privacy, virtual economics and security. Beth Cantrell, Greg Lastowka, and Tadayoshi Kohno also included in panel interview. This event was hosted by the University of Washington Law School.

It is not hard to imagine why robots raise privacy concerns. Practically by definition, robots are equipped with the ability to sense, process, and record the world around them. Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Robots are, first and foremost, a human instrument. And after industrial manufacturing, the principal use to which we’ve put that instrument has been surveillance. This talk explores the various ways that robots implicate privacy and why, absent conscientious legal and design interventions, we may never realize the potential of this transformative technology.